Pope Francis Has Made 14 New Cardinals. Here’s What You Need to Know.

By Gerard O’Connell
America
May 21, 2018

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/05/21/pope-francis-has-made-14-new-cardinals-heres-what-you-need-know

Pope Francis took many Vatican watchers by surprise on Sunday, May 20, when, after reciting the Regina Coeli and praying for peace in the Holy Land and Venezuela, he announced that he would create 14 new cardinals on June 29.

It had been expected that he would hold a consistory this year since the number of cardinal electors would have decreased from 116 to 115 on June 8 when Cardinal Amato of Italy turns 80. Given that this number would not change by reason of age for the rest of the year, it was logical for the pope to decide to hold it at the end of June. In this way, he ensures that the number of electors will remain close to the full complement of 120. With Sunday’s announcement, that number stands at 126 (125 after June 8).

This will be his fifth consistory since his election as pope on March 13, 2013, and Francis has adopted the same criteria in his choice of men to be cardinals: universality; attention to “the peripheries”; humble pastors with “the smell of the sheep”; reducing the overall number of Europeans and Italians in the electoral college; abandoning the tradition that appointment to certain sees automatically brings with it a red hat; and restricting the number of Roman Curia cardinals by reserving the red hat only for the prefects of congregations (or their equivalent).

Pope Francis is trying to ensure that those who elect his successor are humble men committed to “a church of the poor and for the poor.”

By carefully choosing the new cardinals, Pope Francis is trying to ensure that those who elect his successor are humble, spiritual men committed to “a church of the poor and for the poor,” a church that is “a field hospital” and puts mercy at the heart of its mission. The pope wants “a missionary church” that reaches out to the various peripheries of the world, a church, devoid of clericalism, that involves the whole people of God. Francis has now chosen 59 of the 126 current electors—roughly 47 percent of the electoral college. Benedict XVI named 46 of the others, while St. John Paul II created the remaining 20.